Matt wants some measurement of organizing?

Here's a simple measure.  Are people who were not previously privileged with the advantages of professional status, wealth or other social capital taking leadership?

While the blogs and Moveon have undoubtedly done a good job of allowing educated, tech-savvy folks who were not active politically to gain important information to take action, those involved in the netroots are overwhelmingly those who were personally empowered in many ways and were mostly looking for coordinated channels to focus their energy-- which Moveon and the blogs provided, which was a good thing.

But what organizing does is move beyond that strata to folks who, for many personal as well as political reasons, have not previously had such socially-advantaged positions and where leadership is an acquired skill.   I had an exchange with Zach Exley a while back on this issue, so I'll cite a few points from there:

Organizers also need deep, deep engagement with the festering racial, gender and class inequalities that divide people-- and the skills to overcome them to create on-the-ground unity and coordination between local leaders. And yes, they do need, at times, "the vision thing" to place local battles in the context of national struggles, both to help folks struggling with the local battle see where it fits and to avoid a degeneration into NIMBYism or self-satisified union privilege that successful local victories can occasionally fall into...

Real organizing does transform people. It doesn't "enlighten" them, but does help people overcome both the personal and cultural barriers that hold all sorts of leaders back from being as effective as they could be. We live in a country riddled with racial, gender, class, and skill divides and overcoming them to create a united movement is not easy.

It is profoundly dangerous to assume that people will "organize themselves" since that usually means that those with already existing privileges, of both money and social status, will end up running local structures, whether they are really the best leaders or not. Organizers at their best cut through those existing hierarchies and create bonds that go beyond embedded structures of those local privilege.

One reason Obama's organizing is impressive and different from the netroots is that you are seeing new leaders at the grassroots emerging out of communities that have had little or no public leadership role in society. This has many aspects but was early represented by his "barbershop" and "salon" organizing in South Carolina which was driven by lots of one-on-one organizing.

Matt's list of accomplishments for Moveon are not insignificant, but most of them are centered on issues of primary concern of the educated class (aside from the fight on Social Security which was hardly an issue where Moveon was even the lead organization).

True organizing in the past led largely powerless workers to form collective organizations, unions, that profoundly redistributed wealth in society from the owners of capital to employees or empowered terrorized African-Americans to stand up and demand a vote denied them for a century or led to the "personal is political" revolution of feminism where women demanded a radical reordering of the home and family life to achieve more equality.

So far, online organizing has no successes of comparable empowerment of the previously disempowered or social change on that scale. And I'm profoundly skeptical that it will unto itself. The Internet is a wonderful tool, like the telephone before it, but almost any organizer will agree that, ultimately, social change happens face-to-face, person-by-person, so that almost by definition, any organization or "movement" defined by tools that largely bypass such one-on-one exchange will not achieve the most radical social change needed for equality and justice.